Futuristic High-Tech Toilets

The Toilets of the Future Have Arrived

What will toilets look like in the future?
As William Gibson
has observed,
"The future is already here —
it's just not very evenly distributed."
Toilets of the future have been here for some time,
and I have encountered a few of them.
These stunningly futuristic facilities are the antithesis
of much of the rest of my collection.

Automated public toilets were invented in France
and installed in public some time probably around 1990.
The design has since been exported to other countries.
This first one is a classic unit in Paris.

This next one shown below is in the Pigalle district
of Paris, just below Montmartre.
It is more modern.

Entrée gratuite
or free entry, they say.
Originally they cost a few centimes,
but now they're free.

Wait until the green LIBRE or FREE
indicator shows.
That's "free" as in libre or unoccupied,
and not as in gratuite or no fee.
All of them are gratuite all the time,
but they're only libre when no one else
is already inside.
Then press the button and the door opens.

The toilet design has changed over time.

The older ones, like the one seen below with the
yellowish bowl, had an unusual design.
The bowl was just that — a bowl with no drain.
It is flushed after you leave the compartment by
rotating back into the wall and being hosed out.

The newer ones, like this one with the
bright white bowl, have a more conventional design.
But the bowl is still retracted and sprayed down
after every use.

Compartments on the panel above the toilet dispense
toilet paper and provide water, soap, and hot air
for hand cleaning.

A floor sensor detects whether a person is really
inside or not.
If there is no person, or after a period of time even
if there is a person, the door automatically opens.

After the person steps out, the door closes and the
entire interior is sprayed with a disinfectant.
The toilet bowl is rotated back into the wall
and hosed out.
After this quick cycle of 60 seconds or less,
it is available for the next user.

San Francisco, America's most European city in many
ways, has a number of the French design automated toilets.

Here's one undergoing maintenance on the Embarcadero,
the waterfront facing central San Francisco Bay and the
Bay Bridge to Oakland.
That's the Coit Tower up on Telegraph Hill in the background.

This man is working on this one.
Let's see if we can get a look inside
the mechanical back end!

After all, the advertising poster on the side
does say "Voyeur".

The back end contains a mixture of electrical,
water, and waste hardware.

Here is the entry to another automated unit.
This one is at the base of the Coit Tower.

The internationalized signage indicates it's good for
individuals and groups of two, smoking is not allowed,
and it will automatically open in 20 minutes.

The fine print describes all that in more detail
in a variety of written languages.

Much of the interior is cast in a speckled plastic.
The automated sink says:

This toilet has the more traditional design with a drain,
it's not the simple bowl of the early French designs.
This is made of stainless steel, the early and middle
French designs used a white plastic material.

The bowl rotates back ninety degrees during the cleaning
cycle and is cleaned by being sprayed from the rear.

The floor and some of the lower wall surfaces
are covered in a tough corrugated rubber material.
You can see the speckled plastic on the wall at right.

You might notice that the floor feels a little springy
in these automated units.
It's a weight sensor.
The entire floor functions as a crude scale
to determine if it is actually occupied.
If someone starts the cycle and steps out before the door
closes, it will quickly re-open.

This is a Toilette a Grande Vitesse,
or a High Speed Toilet,
found on the TGV or Train a Grande Vitesse,
the High Speed Train running through France.

Before leaving my seat, my GPS had synced up
and was indicating a speed of 305 kilometers per hour.

This electrically-powered toilet seat
is in a luxury hotel room in
Tokyo, Japan.

It was the Hotel Intercontinental.
I was there on business.
It wasn't the hotel in "Lost in Translation"
but it might as well have been.

A console arm beside the seat has
a couple of dials and some push buttons,
and the bottom side of the seat lid has a
multi-paragraph manual explaining its operation.

Unfortunately, it was only in Japanese.
The only English warned that you shouldn't break the
toilet or urinate all over the seat.
But that's always good advice!

Below that are some better images
of a similar high-tech Japanese toilet.

This one is in the Tokyu Haneda Hotel,
including an image of the instruction manual.
This one has at least a little English.

Waterless urinals used to be exotic, but they're
becoming much more common.
The first one of these I saw was at Fort Huachuca,
in south-eastern Arizona.
It featured an eye-level explanation of how the things work:
Teflon-like non-wetting surface, a collection vessel with a
layer of light oil so the urine collects below
a sealed oil surface.
However, as Fort Huachuca is where the US Army does its
intelligence training,
it's not the best place to be taking pictures.

Taking pictures in public restrooms is bad enough,
but taking pictures on intelligence bases is even worse.

I had to wait until spotting this one in the Dark Horse Tavern
along North Highland Avenue in the Virginia Highlands area
of Atlanta, Georgia, USA,
to collect an image of a waterless toilet.

Below is a pair of waterless urinals.
Unlike the above, with its marble-flecked plastic material,
this Sloan Waterfree unit appears to be traditional porcelain,
although probably with a teflon-like coating on the, ah,
active surface, shall we say.

This waterless urinal pair is found in the American Tap Room
bar in the Reston Town Center in Reston, Virginia, USA.

This free-standing waterless urinal is at the
Pasara Thai restaurant at
2501 Jamieson Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia, USA.
This is in the Carlyle area surrounding the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Identical Kohler models can be found in the
international concourse of the Atlanta airport.

Below is a slightly different waterless model, featuring
the fly image pioneered by the urinals at
Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam.
It's actually a bee in this example,
click here to see
the famous Schiphol Airport urinals.
A small target on which to concentrate?
A distraction?
Whatever the mechanism, it is said to significantly
improve cleanliness.

Somewhat ironically, this high-tech urinal was spotted
in the Hand and Bell Tavern in Boston, which claims
to be the oldest bar in U.S. (1795).

This super-fancy bathroom is in the Ambassador Suite
in the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel,
Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

When you turn on the bathroom light, a television
set embedded behind the mirror turns on.
And there is what appears to be an Ethernet jack
in the wall above the handrail next to the toilet!

However, the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel
has horrible service.
I was there for two weeks while working at a conference (although not
staying in the suite shown above!).
Don't stay there, this hotel is awful:

One evening the bellman pushed our group into a
dangerous van instead of
the taxi we had requested.
The driver did not know where we were going,
and then asked for $50 for a one-mile trip.
Half the seats in the van had their backs broken off,
and the roof-mounted air conditioning unit sprinkled water
through the back half of the van.

Our used damp washclothes were left
to pile up in the bathtub,
and we had to go downstairs to ask for
replacement bottles of shampoo multiple times
during our stay.

The concierge was so unfamiliar with the area
that he could not even tell me
where a mailbox was located.

This hotel is so petty and fixated on
taking the guest for everything possible
that they even bill for placing toll-free calls!
And, there is no warning in the room that they are
going to charge you for this.
I questioned this at checkout and
a staff member angrily snapped at me,
"All hotels do that!".
No, they don't, just the rude ones.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.